Nonsense.
All accounts say that God commanded Joshuah to exterminate innocent Canaanite women and children, and that he did it.
Nor has any Jew ever repudiated this awful crime.
{...
So how do we explain the fact that now God evidently commanded Israel to exterminate the entire population of Jericho: men, women, and children? In technical, biblical terms, this is referred to as
herem, a word that literally means "to separate" or “to devote”. This was the practice in which people hostile to God were designated as "off-limits" to Israel and were to be separated or devoted to judgment and destruction (see
Josh. 6:17,
18,
21).
Numerous attempts have been made to dismiss this problem or explain it away. For example:
(1) Some argue that
the decision was Joshua's, which indicates that Israel was simply at a very primitive stage of development. The OT itself is thus a record of a crude, warlike tribe of Hebrews who were simply fighting for survival. But this is difficult to reconcile with the explicit instructions that we see in
Deuteronomy 7:1-2 and
Joshua 10:40 (“just as the Lord God of Israel commanded”).
Related to this idea is the suggestion that the Israelites themselves took the initiative to slaughter the Canaanites and later
rationalized it as the will of God. The many references to God “commanding” that Israel destroy their enemies did not come from God but were later additions to the narrative designed to provide Israel with a moral justification for what they did.
But if the latter were true,
why is there never any correction or rebuke found in the OT or the NT for what Israel did? “If the conquest of Canaan had actually been such a massive and mistaken misinterpretation of God’s will, we should surely read some corrective word later in the Scriptures – if not within the Old Testament itself . . . then at least in the New. But we find none. There is no hint anywhere in the Bible that the Israelites took the land of Canaan on the basis of a mistaken belief in God’s will. On the contrary, the
refusal of the exodus generation to go ahead and do it (in the great rebellion at Kadesh Barnea in Numbers 14), and the
failure of the following generations to complete the task properly, are condemned as
disobedience to God’s will (
Ps. 106:24-35)” (Christopher Wright,
The God I Don’t Understand, 82-83).
...}
Sam Storms: Oklahoma City, OK > Joshua and the Slaughter of the Canaanites Joshua 6:21; 8:24-29; 11:10-15
www.samstorms.org
No civilized person can read the Old Testament and take it seriously as anything but the attempts by criminals to justify their crimes with an imaginary god. Even Norse and Roman mythology is more ethical.
coldwarstudies.com
